


09 December

by TheBee



Series: The Bee's 2014 Advent Calendar [9]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Multi-Era, References to Character Death, references to other Doctors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 21:05:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2747045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBee/pseuds/TheBee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’ve redecorated!” It burst out of her before she realized.</p>
            </blockquote>





	09 December

**Author's Note:**

> POV: Susan Romana Tyler-Noble  
> WARNING: The Doctor's never polite to himself, when he bumps into himself. And when he's stuck around himself, he resorts to rude names. I'd apologize for the Doctor-on-Doctor bashing, but it's in character.  
> Unbeta'd

Susan wasn’t sure what she’d see in the console room. Dad’s memories indicated that every time he had a new self, he had a new console room. Well, Ears and Dad sort of shared one, but Ears wasn’t around too long.

Dad’s latest—no, she had to remember, he wasn’t Dad. He was the Doctor and the Doctor wasn’t Dad. Even if his Tenth self looked so much like Dad and she had to fight every habit to not hug him and touch minds ‘hello’ like she used to do with Dad every time she saw him. She wanted to shriek and hug him and joke with him and she wanted to slap him and run screaming, all at the same time. The best thing she could do was just not look at him.

_Latest Doctor. I’ll call the grey-haired fellow with the Scottish accent Latest Doctor. The young-looking one with the bow tie… Next Doctor. He was the one after Dad’s progenitor, so that works. And Dad’s original would have to be—oh, I might as well just give it up and call him Dad-Doctor. Because he is, isn’t he?_

Latest Doctor opened the door at the end of the hallway and she could hear and feel the hum of the TARDIS changing pitch. Oh, the two TARDISes were so different, but so alike, too! It wasn’t better than their own TARDIS, just more… complex. Richer. More depth of meaning. Someday, the family TARDIS would sound and feel like this, too, but she wouldn’t ever be able to experience it.

Next Doctor bounded through the door to the console room. Latest Doctor had stridden in without checking whether anyone got hit by the door behind him. She followed, with Dad-Doctor right behind her, and gazed at the room in wonder.

It was unlike anything in Dad’s memories.

“You’ve redecorated!” It burst out of her before she realized. Latest Doctor gave her a sour look. “It’s beautiful,” she said with a smile. “I like it.”

She felt, more than saw, three sets of eyes looking at her strangely.

“Sorry.”

“Now, Tyler,” Next Doctor said. “How did you get here with this”—he ticked the yellow dimension jumper hanging around her neck—“obsolete technology?”

“Well, it generates a sort of a bubble”—right, this was the Doctor, not Mum. She could use all the Gallifreyan terminology she needed to explain. She opened up the memories and scanned for the proper words. “Dad would have called it a temporal enclosement, passing through the sub-quantum field and translated from one set of chronoid particles to another. Only feasible because the heart of our TARDIS and your TARDIS are, essentially, the same heart. And since it’s operating on the sub-quantum level, the size of the opening between universes wasn’t important. Those sort of pinprick openings have to stay open, because otherwise each universe is a closed system, leading to accelerated temporal decay.” Dad-Doctor looked appalled. Next Doctor was getting the twitchy frowns and Latest Doctor… well, actually, his face looked the same. “The only issue was that with two separate universes, the chronoid particles have slightly different harmonics, which is another reason why they sent me.”

“Because you had to help my TARDIS translate your native particles to this universe’s setting while sifting yourself through multiple pinprick openings,” Latest Doctor finished.

“Yeah.” _And ‘sifting’ really **was** a good metaphor for the experience._

“And that requires a certain level of psychic sensitivity,” Next Doctor added.

She nodded.

“That would have been quite painful,” Latest Doctor said.

She nodded again.

“You could have died!” Dad-Doctor shouted.

_Rassilon, he was like Dad!_


End file.
